4 ms·
> The issue is not that nobody can hold these systems in their head, they can - they're just not paid to. As of 2022, the largest transistor count in a commerc
by _gabe_ 4y ago
> The issue is not that nobody can hold these systems in their head, they can - they're just not paid to.
As of 2022, the largest transistor count in a commercially available microprocessor is 114 billion transistors[0]
According to cloc run against 3.13, Linux is about 12 million lines of code.[1]
Anyone that tells you they can keep this much information in their head is lying to you. And this doesn't even include how many lines of code are in a modern browser, which is still before we even get to a modern web dev stack. The total culmination of layers of code is impossible for any one person to hold in their head.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-linux-kernel-15-million-lines-of-code https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...
- hazelnut-tree 4y agoI agree. In fact, many open source (and closed source) codebases are understood by only a handful of developers with deep understanding of the design and code (e.g. the original developer or a developer with many contributions). The rest of us (including me) have a superficial understanding of the code at best. There's even a word that developers use to describe popular open source frameworks: 'magic'. A euphemistic way to say: 'I have no-idea how the code fit together, but this code library or framework is popular and it all works'.